Accept Bitcoin
Accept Bitcoin directly to your own wallet
Every invoice gets its own fresh Bitcoin address, derived from a wallet you generated and control. The payment goes from your customer to you. Nothing sits in between holding it, and no percentage of it is taken on the way.
A fresh address for every invoice
Reusing one address across customers is the mistake that makes Bitcoin unusable for a business: two people send similar amounts and you cannot tell which invoice was paid. Each invoice here derives its own address, so an arriving payment identifies itself. There is no memo to forget and no reference field to get wrong.
It is also the better privacy default. A single address published on a website is a public ledger of everything that business has ever been paid.
What you hand over, and what you keep
You give Unheld an extended public key — the watch-only half of your wallet. It is enough to derive your receive addresses and read what arrives on them, and it is not enough to authorise a single transaction. Your secret recovery phrase is generated in your browser and never sent anywhere.
The consequence is worth stating plainly: if someone took everything Unheld stores, they could see which addresses are yours and what they received. They could not spend a satoshi of it. That is a privacy problem, not a solvency one.
Detected, then confirmed
You are told twice. Once when the transaction appears — enough to show your customer a “payment received” and stop them paying again — and once when it has enough confirmations to be treated as final. The two are separate events precisely so you can be fast with the customer and careful with the goods.
Confirmation thresholds are per network and shown on the supported networks page. Do not ship physical goods on detection alone; that is what the confirmed event is for.
What the customer sees
A hosted payment page with the exact amount, the address, a QR code and a countdown. They scan it with any Bitcoin wallet and send. There is no account to create on their side and no app they have to be using already.
What to plan for
These are properties of the money and the network. Design around them and the rail behaves exactly as you expect.
- A confirmed payment cannot be reversed by anyone — not by us, not by the sender, not by a court order. That protects you from chargebacks and it means a mistaken send is gone.
- The network fee is paid by the payer to the Bitcoin network, not to us. When the network is busy that fee rises, and a small invoice can become uneconomical to pay.
- Bitcoin moves against your local currency between the moment you price an invoice and the moment it settles. Price in a stablecoin if you need the amount to hold its meaning.
- A payer who sends slightly less leaves an underpaid invoice, not a paid one. Unheld reports the exact status and accumulates partial payments, so a second transfer can complete it — but the decision to accept a shortfall is yours.
Questions
Does Unheld ever hold my bitcoin?
No. Payments land on addresses derived from your own wallet, and Unheld stores only the extended public key needed to watch them. There is no balance here, nothing to withdraw and no payout to approve — the coin is already yours when it arrives.
Why does every invoice have a different address?
So a payment can identify itself. One shared address tells you an amount and a sender but never which order it belongs to, and matching by amount breaks the first time two people send the same figure. A fresh address per invoice removes that class of problem entirely, and keeps your payment history from being one public list.
What happens if someone pays after the invoice expires?
The money is not lost — it arrived at an address derived from your wallet, so it is yours either way. Unheld watches those addresses beyond the expiry window and reports a late payment rather than pretending it never happened. What you do about the order is your call.
Which wallet do I need?
Any standard Bitcoin wallet that gives you a recovery phrase. You generate it yourself in the browser, and the same phrase opens the same wallet in any other standard wallet software — so nothing about this account can trap your funds.
Try it on testnet first
Create an invoice, send test coins to it, and watch the detection and confirmation arrive — before a single real satoshi is involved.
Start freeNetworks · Non-custodial · Payment links · Pricing · Answered plainly.